Hi. I'm David Riethof.

As a User Experience Director, I lead web projects from research to insights to ideas to evaluation to execution. I'm a vision creator, a design defender, and a customer evangelist. My main deliverable? Value!


Welcome to my portfolio!

Areas of Expertise

B2B & E-Commerce Strategy

I specialize in solving the complicated data, content, and UX problems of B2B and e-commerce sites.
 

Multi-Device Strategy

Websites work best when you optimize content and design for ALL devices—there's no "mobile first, desktop worst" with me.
 

CMS, PIM & Search Strategy

UX is more than pretty wireframes! Designs have to be easy to build and author. Content has to be structured and tagged for dynamic publishing and faceted search.

8 guiding Principles & Processes

  • UX is destructive and disruptive.

    In UX and content strategy, we go from research to insight to ideation to evaluation to execution. The first 4 comprise user-centered design, where nothing is sacred and everything is called into question. It's destructive and disruptive... in a good way!

  • Design is about problem solving.

    Above all, I consider myself a business problem solver. How do I help clients increase revenue and traffic on their site? Decrease support calls? Good design and content can dramatically transform the way you do business online.

  • What's your UX and content vision?

    What content and features should your site have? Which are most important to your customers? What do you work on first? I help clients develop a clear vision of exactly where their site should be in 2 years—and an achievable plan for getting there.

  • Alignment–the biggest challenge.

    The biggest challenge in any project is how to articulate a design problem, align a group of stakeholders, then decide what a team is going to build. The rest, as they say, is just details (though depite the aphorism, details do matter. A lot).

  • Research + Insights = Success

    In any project, there's an endless list of things you could work on. But to solve the right problems, you need insights, and these only come from research: analytics, usabilty testing, and heuristic analyses. There's no shortcuts.

  • If they can't find it, they can't buy it.

    I'm an expert at solving tough findabilty problems. I start by helping clients organize and label their sites based on how their customers think. My toolkit: site taxonomies, enterprise search, type ahead strategy, navigation, and faceted browsing.

  • Design your data and content too!

    Today's PIM and CMS-based content is published dynamically on multiple devices and 3rd party sites. This requires a new way of thinking about content. Now it's all about structure and tagging and content and data modeling. Are you ready?

  • If you're not testing, you're just guessing.

    Want to save time and money? Then do remote usabilty testing—early and often! It's the cheapest, fastest, and most quantitaive way to test your designs and catch big usabilty problems before they become big business and customer problems.

Client’s talking

  • David totally transformed our website! We really learned a lot from working with him. We don't just put content in one place anymore! He worked with us on a complete site redesign—navigation, labeling, product pages, faceted browsing, marketing pages, the works. Traffic to our key pages went up by as much as 500% after we launched!

    Sally Kresge Director of Digitial Marketing, Armstrong Commercial Ceilings
  • David totally transformed our website! We really learned a lot from working with him. We don't just put content in one place anymore! He worked with us on a complete site redesign—navigation, labeling, product pages, faceted browsing, marketing pages, the works. Traffic to our key pages went up by as much as 500% after we launched!

    Sally Kresge Director of Digitial Marketing, Armstrong Commercial Ceilings
  • David totally transformed our website! We really learned a lot from working with him. We don't just put content in one place anymore! He worked with us on a complete site redesign—navigation, labeling, product pages, faceted browsing, marketing pages, the works. Traffic to our key pages went up by as much as 500% after we launched!

    Sally Kresge Director of Digitial Marketing, Armstrong Commercial Ceilings

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